I understand that daily exercise helps reduce IR, so I faithfully climb on my exercise bike and pedal away for 30-50 mins every day in 2 sessions (easier since I was laidoff — can I call this a benefit of being laidoff? *G*). I just started r-lipoic acid @ 50 mg/day to see how my gut likes it (goal is 150-300 mg/day)…had a bad reaction several yrs ago but that was to the mixed R and S form. I’ve also been talking benfotiamine (300 mg/day) that following 1st 150 mg dropped my bedtime BG by 30 pts and next morning BG by 18 pts…*sigh* hasn’t repeated since…BUT my mood is improved (being laidoff usually makes me seriously depressed yet I’m not) and my systolic is 12 pts lower.

I’ve seen it in practice, and it’s in the medical literature. Everything you read about rat studies can’t be applied to humans.

“Too Much Protein, Eaten Along With Fat, May Lead To Insulin Resistance”

I understand that they tested rats to see how they responded which obviously would give bogus results, however, along with the “Meat is Deadly” fiasco recently, this study doesn’t really do much for the low-carm community. What’s your view on the study?

Stu

I wonder if the compilers think diet books are ephemeral, that they’re the latest trendy thing and once they’re off the list they’ll vanish into oblivion when the next big diet comes along? So that even though they sell in millions, they’re soon forgotten.

A bit like you do with scentific papers, only in exact reverse.

Two of the most “intelligent” people I know have hardly any academic qualifications between them. One is a company director (and owner), the other is an artist. Both have the ability to see and respond to the world as it actually is and act accordingly, an uncommon skill nowadays.

Taubes’ book is called Good Calories Bad Calories in most markets but has been renamed The Diet Delusion in the UK. I wonder how that affects its position on bestseller lists?

Before I started experimenting with low-carb (I’m ashamed to say I haven’t made the switch permanent yet), I would have the most horrific mood swings and brain fog. Once I started it was like being on anti-depressants but without the zombie-ness and I still had my sex drive intact. (TMI, sorry.) The smartest animals by IQ, which I have no idea how they test for it, seem to be carnivores or meat-favoring omnivores. Go figure.

I will have to respectfully disagree with your inference that one must be a reader to be a critical thinker. Critical thinking is a skill anyone can learn no matter what their primary method of receiving information. We were social animals well before the advent of the written word and you don’t go thousands of years as a social animal if you don’t learn to sort the B.S. from the truth early on.

I think whatever is wrong with society now runs much more deeply than that. The central problem, as I see it, is that despite our efforts and claims to the contrary, most human beings are concrete thinkers. We are more likely to believe the evidence of our senses, even when those senses are dulled, than we are to believe statements that we perceive as disconnected from reality. So the person who believes he has had a personal experience with God is more likely to be religious, and the person who has had a close brush with death more clearly understands that he is mortal. Before then, reference to either is nothing but empty rhetoric.

Toss in the fact that as social animals we are always looking to someone else to set the example for how we should behave. I think this is less about small-mindedness or laziness than it is simple instinct, one of the few we have left (or will acknowledge, anyway).

And some of us have gotten smart enough and learned enough by now to be able to manipulate these things. It’s called “marketing.” And TV has made this easier than ever. Think about it. It’s not just images, it’s moving images. The people in the moving images might as well be in the same room as you. Your hundreds-of-thousands-of-years-old brain, which evolved looking at actual, living, breathing, moving people, has no evolutionary experience with images of living, breathing, moving people on the TV or in a movie. While your intellect may tell you the moving pictures aren’t real, your primitive brain tells you a different story.

Marketing people know this. That’s how any number of public institutions, from Hollywood to the White House (no matter who’s in it), get away with lying to us. Until a person has experience with being lied to and screwed over, his default assumption about other people is that they are trustworthy, because we couldn’t be social animals if we didn’t first assume the best about one another. Think about who falls for Hollywood and government crap. It’s not the cynics.

I wouldn’t be so hard on folks who are ignorant. They simply don’t know. God knows that even with everything I have learned I still sometimes wish with all my might that the “experts” were right about something I know they’re wrong about. It can be hard to let go and rely on yourself when people who promised to be there for you disappoint you again and again. I would guess some of these ignorant people are also frightened of the unknown.